Future vision of data communication in fibre
Fibre optics has continued to provide a flexible technology that enables the transfer of large amounts of data across long distances at very high bandwidths.
Optical fibre technology has been tried and tested in transoceanic communication and offers gigabit communication bandwidths which enable high speed data transfer. This helps to speed up communication and access to internet services across the world at affordable prices.
Advancing to the use of fibre optics in data communication will provide a platform suitable for up to 2.5Gbit/sec of data transfer. Such a platform is expected to support various architectures of communication with examples being layouts such as ring, star, bus and tree configurations.
Most of these layouts are advantageous since they have higher fault tolerance than those that are in use currently. This therefore means that they will be more effective in terms of transmitting huge amounts of data.
Optical fibre will therefore offer a secure data communication channel since it is not possible to tamper with them without detection. This is due to the fact that the power loss that occurs due to tampering cannot go unnoticed (Agrawal, 2002).
It has been suggested by many communication experts that optical fibre is very expensive and fragile. It is however expected that the continued manufacture of optical fibre cables will lower the costs and therefore make fibre the cheaper option as compared to copper.
Another major concern is the fragility associated with fibre. Any installation of fibre should be carried out by technicians who are knowledgeable about it in order to avoid losses due to breakages (Agrawal, 2002).
Future analysis of packet switching
Packet switching is another technology that is expected to have a great impact on the future of communication.
In future, packet switching is expected to shape the storage of data due to the fact that the amount of digital data that need storage space today is increasing at a very fast rate and packet switching will offer the solution needed.
The recent past has seen an incredible increase in the demand for capacity for the storage of data as a result of increased use of the internet and other related services. It is therefore necessary for data transport networks to evolve in order to meet these needs.
Packet switching therefore will be used to provide an optical layer which can be reconfigured with optical cross-connects in order to realise a flexible core with a very high bandwidth capable of supporting the increased capacity.
This means that this evolution and adoption of packet switching will offer the technology industry a circuit switched optical layer which will enable high capacity data storage and transfer as well as fast circuit provisioning (O’Mahony et al., 2002).
The increasing multimedia traffic in terms of internet use has also led to the need for the development of packet switching. This is due to the fact that it will help ensure that network resources are used in an economical manner.
Packet switching offers very high bandwidth efficiency and therefore plays an important role in making this possible. It has also been envisioned that in future, optical packet router can be used as an edge network device which will be designed to function as an interface to link the optical domain to the electronic ones.
This is expected to provide flexibility and efficiency at a lower cost than when using electronic routers (O’Mahony et al., 2002).
Conclusion
The discussion above has shown that the future of communication and data storage and transfer are expected to change as a result of these two technologies. They will provide the high bandwidth and efficiency required to support the increasing need for internet services and data storage capacity.
References
Agrawal, G. P. (2002). Fiber-Optic Communication Systems. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
O’Mahony, M. J., Simeonidou, D., Hunter, D. K. & Tzanakaki, A. (2002). The application of optical packet switching in future communication networks. Communications Magazine IEEE, 39(3), 128-135